POTATOES.
A family of plants is a group of different kinds which bears certain general resemblances to each other. The flowers are often the parts that exhibit these family characteristics, when other features are so modified that the members seem very far apart. The fruits of closely related plants may be so changed by cultivation that they are scarcely recognizable as relatives of their wild parents, even.
The family to which the potato belongs is called Solanacex. In it are seventy genera, and these include fifteen hundred species. The genus Solanum covers the potatoes, the egg plants, the nightshades, and the bittersweet. The genus Capsicum includes the red peppers. Lycopersi cum is the tomato genus. Nicotiana is tobacco. Datura is the Jamestown weed — or " Jimson weed." A genus includes petunias. Another, the ground cherries.
All these plants are alike in having alternate leaves, regular, five-parted flowers, with a single pistil, two-celled, maturing into a capsule or a berry, with numerous seeds.
The potato plant grows to maturity in one sea son and produces clusters of pale purplish or white, wheel-shaped flowers, followed by soft, green ber ries filled with very bitter pulp, that surrounds the little seeds.
Underground, the potato has a good supply of fibrous roots. Certain strong branches of the roots end in fleshy tubers. These have eyes, or dimples, with a bud, or a cluster of buds, in each. Later these buds prolong themselves into leafy stems.
This makes it plain that the tubers are under ground stems, not roots. They act for the plant as storage places for reserve food.
Many potato plants have abandoned the habit of flowering, and rely for the continuation of the race upon the tubers, which are dormant through the winter, but sprout when spring comes. The potato plant dies like any annual. The tuber grows the second spring like the root of a biennial, such as the beet and parsnip. The farmer cuts up the "seed potatoes" into pieces with a generous portion of the starchy flesh to each good "eye."
He plants these pieces, and each bud sends up a plant. These "cuttings" produce plants like the parent. Potato seeds rarely do this. The experi menting seedsman plants potato seeds in hope of discovering among the plants a new and desirable variety. Once in a hundred trials he may get something worth while. It is an interesting game.
High in the Andes of Chile and Peru the potato grows wild. It is common, too, along the coast. Related species are abundant in the highlands of Central America and Mexico.
The Spanish invaders probably brought it to Europe during the sixteenth century, and it spread rapidly through the southern countries. These same explorers may have been the means of estab lishing the potato as a food crop among the Indians that tilled the soil, for it was not known to them before the white men came.
Sir Walter Raleigh introduced both potato and tobacco into England. He grew potatoes in his own garden. Long after it had been grown as a garden vegetable, potato culture widened in importance until, during the eighteenth cen tury, Scotland was raising potatoes as a field crop, and the French people were awake to its value.
The name, Irish potato, universally used to dis tinguish this vegetable from the sweet potato, came from the fact that the potato saved Ireland from the famines that recurred with terrible certainty until the potato was introduced. Now other crops fail, but the potato stands by.
Occasionally the potato crop is a failure. In 1845 a disease called blight attacked the foliage of the plants, preventing the formation of the tubers. This caused a potato famine over all this country and Europe. No such thing can happen again, for spraying the field with Bordeaux mixture, a solution of blue stone and lime, kills the fungus, and saves the foliage. Paris green, added to the spray, kills by poisoning the potato bug, which is the chief insect enemy of the crop.